


off to the races

by firstaudrina



Category: Gossip Girl (TV 2007)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, Multi, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:41:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22355032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: Her eyes meet Blair's in the mirror, her fingers in Blair's curls. "You don't want to be here," Beatrice says, sounding certain. "So let's go."
Relationships: Blair Waldorf/Beatrice Grimaldi, Blair Waldorf/Dan Humphrey/Beatrice Grimaldi, Dan Humphrey/Beatrice Grimaldi, Dan Humphrey/Blair Waldorf
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	1. Chapter 1

Beatrice has gray eyes like flint, ready to spark. She's too dark for the pale pink cotton candy confection of a bridesmaid dress Blair had put her in, black hair and black lashes and sharp fuchsia lips.

Her eyes meet Blair's in the mirror, her fingers in Blair's curls. "You don't want to be here," she says, sounding certain. "So let's go."

Blair swallows hard, a million excuses on her tongue, but all she says is, "I have to make a call first."

On the plane, Dan says, "I can't believe I'm stealing a royal bride."

"You're not," Beatrice says, flipping through a gossip rag she'd picked up at the terminal. Blair and Louis are on the cover of it. "I am."

"No one's stealing anyone," Blair hisses. Her heart is still beating too fast, breathing coming too fast; she can't believe she left, can't believe she's on a plane instead of at the end of the aisle.

Dan slides his hand into hers. "You're okay," he tells her softly and Blair takes her first deep breath.

They go to Athens only because Blair has never been, and even Beatrice can see the light of excitement in Dan's eyes under the anxiety.

It's not exactly perfect beach weather but they take the hour trip out to Sounion the first day for that very purpose anyway. It's depressingly overcast; Blair huddles into Dan's tailcoat, dressed in Beatrice's clothes underneath because they only had her suitcases to run with. The sky is like Beatrice's eyes, gray and threatening.

Beatrice unzips her black boots and her blue dress and walks naked into the water. She swims out until all they can see is black hair floating on the surface like seaweed. When Beatrice reemerges dripping wet she's like a mermaid, the kind who brings sailors crashing to their death.

Dan puts his arm around Blair's waist. _You're okay_ , Blair thinks and relaxes into his side.

They get one hotel room with two beds, the girls in one and Dan in the other. Beatrice said something about keeping a low profile but Blair thinks they just want to be close to her in case she flies off the handle or something.

Blair wakes up one night to the sound of stifled moaning, finds the bed empty beside her and the linens cool. If she's surprised, it's only because it wasn't her first.

Dan appears stunned, looking up at Beatrice with his hand on her small breast, thumb rubbing over her nipple intently. Beatrice seems something of a witch, still, with her black hair and her strange eyes, her odd unhappy mouth, and her skin so white it's almost blue.

Seeing Dan like this is…odd, to say the least. Blair doesn't really think of him as a person who has sex, even though she's probably more aware of his sexual history than she'd like to be. She wouldn't have known how to conceptualize of it. She wouldn't have known to picture the way he throws his head back, his eyes shut tight and lip caught by his teeth, his throat a smooth sharp line angling bluntly into collarbone before curving into shoulder. He's almost pretty, really.

It's sudden that he tips Beatrice over onto her back, one arm sliding under her and the other hand hooking her leg higher on his waist. Beatrice is sulky and unresponsive to his kisses even as her hips lift for him, her hand tight in his curls. She opens her eyes and looks right at Blair, a sudden shock like being struck by lightning.

Blair turns over and goes back to sleep, or tries to. Dan's voice, his low voice, is all she hears.

Blair ignores Dan for three days, feeling angry and betrayed. She doesn't know why she's not angry with Beatrice – maybe she just doesn't want to be entirely alone here – but she's not. They walk arm in arm through the streets, both in Beatrice's dresses, and pretend to be sisters; they cut their hair in identical bobs and wear the same shade of lipstick, Beatrice applying it to Blair's mouth with careful intensity. Then she kisses Blair.

"I did it because you would not," she says, "and he would not."

Dan is reading on a bench outside the hotel when they get back. He double-takes when he sees them, says, "That's some disguise, girls."

Blair goes to dinner with Dan, just Dan, wearing a black dress of Beatrice's that cuts so low in front Blair spends the whole night tugging at it in fear of exposure. Dan doesn't mention his night with Beatrice and Blair wonders if he even knows she knows; it wouldn't be the first time she's ignored him seemingly for nothing.

On the way back to the room, the only ones in the dim hallway, Blair adjusts her dress again, impatiently. Dan makes a little sound, frustrated and wanting, and curls his hand around her wrist, pulls her towards him; he kisses her palm first and then the inside of her arm, the bared space between her breasts, her throat, her mouth. Blair is breathless, boneless, can only slump against the wall between two doors and let Dan put his mouth on her, thinking not for the first time of the naked lines of him.

But it's _Dan_ – it's Dan with his hands on her, Dan kissing her desperately, her friend Dan who she treats half like a girlfriend and half like an assistant, Dan her best friend.

"I can't," Blair says, whispered so soft it's like she barely said it. She slides out from under him, rushes down the hall to the room and doesn't look back. She doesn't know she's crying until Beatrice's arms are around her and she's saying, "I'm such a mess, I'm such a stupid mess –"

Beatrice hushes her and kisses her, a series of comforting quick kisses that do little to soothe Blair. _You're okay_ , Blair reminds herself; she's safe. She made the right choice, hurt Louis then so she wouldn't have to hurt him more later. It's better this way. Beatrice had been right; Blair hadn't wanted to be there in that church in that big white dress.

It's still probably a mistake to let Louis' sister kiss her, to kiss back more openly than she'd ever kissed him. Beatrice's hand goes between Blair's legs where she is already wet; she pushes Blair's – her – dress aside to put her mouth on Blair's breast, nip a little too sharply with her teeth. Blair comes in a shivering wave and does not remember the last time that happened, the last time someone else made her come.

Dan comes in much later. He smells like he's been drinking, having a few cigarettes. Beatrice is asleep but Blair is not and she reaches out for him; he drops down next to her and into her arms. "I'm sorry," he says.

Blair's dress is still awkwardly twisted around her and her thighs feel sticky but for some reason she doesn't really care as she presses closer, her leg sliding between his and her hands gripping the back of his shirt.

"Don't be sorry," she breathes.

Blair wakes to Dan still tucked against her, his even breathing warm against her throat. Blair shifts a little to dislodge his sleep-heavy arm and feels his lips brush her skin lightly. Skinnier, more feminine fingers traipse deliberately over Blair's inner thigh and she turns to meet Beatrice's eyes.

"He loves you, you know," Beatrice says.

It's too early for Blair to deal with this so she lets her eyes fall shut again. Beatrice presses light kisses to Blair's cheeks, her eyelids. Two fingers trace Blair through her panties. Blair needs a shower. Dan makes a deep, sleep-satisfied sound but doesn't wake and Blair bites her lip hard as Beatrice's fingers slide into her.

"Of course you know," Beatrice says. It suddenly strikes Blair that Beatrice thinks she is in love with Dan – that she would have every reason to think Blair is in love with Dan. When they left, Dan is all Blair thought to bring with her.

Blair turns towards Dan's sleeping face. He's frowning slightly, brows drawn together, and Blair reaches up to touch his mouth as Beatrice strokes her faster, presses deeper. Blair gasps a little. Dan's lips pull into a soft pout and his eyes open hazy and hesitant.

"Blair," he murmurs softly, questioningly, and Blair's only answer is a moan.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes Blair thinks everything is lovelier on the run.

When they leave Greece they go to Spain, to an apartment Beatrice has under a different name. She has apartments everywhere under different names. She says escaping her mother has become its own form of espionage.

Beatrice asks Dan, "Do you think you'll have better luck in Granada?" and he only rolls his eyes.

The day before they left Athens, the three of them returned to the beach despite the even less welcoming weather. They were odd little dark blots on the gray stretch of sand and water with their jackets and pants and boots. Dan made a half-hearted attempt at a sandcastle. Blair buried her cell phone underneath it.

Blair wants to go to Paris, really, but it isn't possible. Paris is the first place anyone would look for her and Blair doesn't want to be found. Anyway, she feels as though she gave up the whole country of France, the whole principality of Monaco, when she gave up Louis. Maybe one day she can go back, but not today.

Blair reads Sylvia Plath and Dan reads Ted Hughes, and then they switch. She reads Frank O'Hara to him outside at café tables. He reads Anne Sexton to her when she's in the bath. The only movies they watch are pre-code, full of women with thin curved brows who read Nietzsche and drive men to suicide. Dan attempts to remain very cool and detached and scholarly about it, but Blair suspects he is hot for Barbara Stanwyck.

He and Beatrice fight endlessly about music. She gets so mad at him that she can only speak in French, Blair translating in a rapid murmur and Dan barely waiting to hear enough before shouting back. Beatrice likes music that Blair doesn't, really, but Blair is discovering a taste for new things. She is sick of everything she likes. She is sick of everything that makes her up, defines her, confines her. She thinks she left that Blair behind in New York and became a new one on the plane.

The music Beatrice likes best is dated but electric, sexual. Dan always seems to know all the words to everything, for whatever reason, and this allows him some forgiveness from Beatrice – for a time, at least. Dan sings along playfully, pitching his voice a little lower, his posture loosening noticeably. Blair realizes just how tensely Dan holds himself all the time.

Dan sits beside Blair and leans in, sings the words into her ear, against her skin. Beatrice watches with a closed-mouth smile. Blair laughs, but shivers too. He slips down, mouths the song up along her thigh and against her cunt, a sweet low humming.

That's about as far as it ever gets.

They kiss all the time now, make out high school-style for hours and hours, Dan in the cradle of her hips rocking against her, hands running over bodies over clothes. Blair can usually get off this way at least once; nothing world-ending, just a little orgasm that rolls through her and leaves her feeling blurry and warm. A starter orgasm. Dan has to pull away then, and Beatrice steps in to fill their gaps like she does. She's become more tender with Dan than she was at first; she puts her arm around him and unzips his trousers, whispering nonstop in his ear as her hand slides over his cock. Blair never asks what she says to him. Whatever it is makes him frown, brow furrowing. His skin flushes and he looks almost annoyed, almost uncomfortable.

Blair likes watching him like that. Sometimes she asks him to do it when they're alone, and because he's Dan he always obliges.

Beatrice will occasionally round on Dan and Blair when the art in the museums bores her. She will lift Blair's arm aloft and comment on her well-crafted limbs and beautiful skin, the dip in her lower lip and the way her new short hair curls against her cheeks. Blair tries not to smile, tries to look very serious about it all. Beatrice tilts Dan's face side to side and trails fingers over the planes of his cheekbones, looks to Blair and says, "Isn't he very beautiful?"

It makes Dan hilariously uncomfortable. He fidgets out of Beatrice's hold and tries to turn the conversation back to the art, which only eggs Beatrice on more. He's subjected to an afternoon of hearing about his beauty after that, although he leaves in a huff after an hour or so of it.

Privately Blair thinks _yes, yes he is very beautiful_ and the funniest part is, she never would have noticed in New York. There he was only ever Dan who wore ugly pants and had a succession of silly haircuts. Here his thin angular face seems to stand out in complementary contrast to his soft curls, his mouth prettily shaped and stubble shading his angles harsher. Dan Humphrey from Brooklyn, very beautiful. Who would have thought?

His limited wardrobe here works for him too. He has only the remnants of the wedding suit, a pair of black jeans, and handful of sweaters in muted tones – all of it chosen by Blair and, thanks to her, tasteful and classic. Blair has always liked a lot of fuss, a lot of color and decoration and planning, but Dan looks better without all that. She's trying it out too, simplicity, wearing knee-length dresses of solid color with buttons down the front, well-structured jackets, boots and simple caps.

Sometimes Blair thinks everything is lovelier on the run.

Dan does a lot of writing in the early morning before everyone is properly awake. He keeps odd hours, which Blair never knew, sleeping very, very little. He sits in just trousers or briefs at the desk by the window, typing away and smoking Beatrice's cigarettes, which she hates.

Dan also cleans, obsessively and naturally, the kind of person who has had to clean up after himself all his life and doesn't even think twice about it. Beatrice remarks that the place has not been so clean in years, that none of her places have been, and she should hire his services. Dan answers that with a single finger.

Beatrice's apartment is spartan but spacious, just a few pieces of furniture strategically arranged in the handful of rooms. It's not quite the palace of a princess but it's probably the closest Blair will get to pretending to be Holly Golightly. Blair certainly prefers it to the hotel, padding around in one of Dan's sweaters and drinking wine with Beatrice on the balcony. They all share the bedroom, curling together on the bed at all different hours, and none of them answer calls or go online. They simply choose to forget that the rest of the world exists and unless someone shows up on their doorstep looking for her, Blair intends to continue in that vein.

Sometimes Beatrice will dress Blair up and take her out. "No boys," she tells Dan firmly, barely sparing him a glance. "Tonight is just for us."

They already look similar thanks to their coloring and shorn hair, but Beatrice does their makeup the same too – black smudged eyeliner and glowing pale skin, pomegranate-colored lip stain that makes their mouths look soft and bitten. It's nothing Blair would ever do herself. They dress in dark, rich colors and go to clubs to dance and flirt with men they never intend to bring home. It makes Blair miss Serena with sudden acuteness, because they never really got to do anything like this together. Blair was always too busy trying be the good one, and then she was too busy trying to avoid a broken heart. It feels freeing to drink and dance and lead boys on, then kiss Beatrice out on the street as they stumble intoxicated back to the flat.

Over the past three years or so, Blair has felt an increasing loss of identity, her clear, defined lines becoming muddled and obscure. She felt like some girl playing the part of Blair Waldorf, dressed in costume and saying lines. Now, far away from the city that she always thought of as hers and looking nothing like herself, she feels sharp and distinct again. She feels like she's living in her skin again.

Beatrice photographs her, brushing off the hobby as "just something I used to do." It starts one of the nights they go out, when at four in the morning Blair just sits in the middle of the living room floor next to her kicked-off heels and looks up at Beatrice with ruined makeup and a smile. "Hold on," Beatrice murmurs, disappearing and then returning with a camera glazed with dust. She snaps Blair's picture.

"I look a mess," Blair says flatly, unimpressed.

Beatrice says, "Take off your dress."

They're not like any photos that exist of Blair. They're not friends' snapshots or blurred cell phone pictures taken at a distance. They are not posed or fake.

Dan looks over them later, smoking one of Beatrice's black and gold cigarettes. Beatrice watches him out of the corner of her eye, frowning.

"What do you think?" Blair asks, eyes on the glossy grayscale prints.

"I think you're beautiful," Dan says.

It isn't the point, but she can't deny that it's nice to hear.

When they're out, Beatrice uses the fake name she bought the apartment under and tells people that Blair and Dan are her siblings. Blair pretends to speak only French and Dan pretends not to speak at all, because he'd give the whole game away if he did. He's lucky sullen and silent is a look that works for him. Beatrice is Mathilde and Blair is Léa and Dan is Alain; play-acting makes him impatient because he's terrible at lying but Blair settles into it like she was born to, giving such detailed tales to strangers that even she isn't sure what's true and what isn't at the end of the conversation.

When Blair asks him why he doesn't like it, he says, "I just don't want to be anybody else," and it stops her right in her tracks. She can't imagine what that's like.

Dan is writing, and Beatrice has Blair in bed.

The sound of the keyboard is soft and relentless under the steady thrum of music, heady and clanging. "All-girl school was worth something," Beatrice says.

"I don't know what they were teaching you in France," Blair says with a little gasp, "but I did not receive the same education."

"No?" Beatrice laughs. "Surely, your blonde friend –"

"Surely nothing," Blair says, as flatly as she can manage in a situation like this, with Beatrice's hands on her. She doesn’t want to talk about Serena.

"The power trip was more than enough for her," comes Dan's voice from the other room. The typing has stopped, momentarily. There's the sound of coffee being poured.

"He doesn't know what he's –" Blair murmurs, eyes fluttering shut, "He doesn't know anything."

"Some things, perhaps," Beatrice says, pulling her hand away without warning and bringing it to her mouth. "Do you know some things too?"

Beatrice sits back, her short hair falling mussed around her face, and sucks lightly on her fingers. One of the straps of her electric blue bra is falling off her shoulder. Usually when Blair looks at other girls it is to critique or compare but when she looks at Beatrice she just sees a girl who is very beautiful, a girl she wants to kiss.

"A few," Blair answers with a little smile, reaching for her again. She can't pretend it's entirely new, that she and Serena didn't play games when they were young or make mistakes when they were drunk. But this isn't like that.

Blair had thought, at first, that being with a woman would be natural as breathing but navigating someone else's body never is, and Blair had needed to figure out everything again, backwards.

Beatrice's skin is smooth and cool. She wears jasmine perfume that clings so close to her that Blair only notices it with her lips to Beatrice's throat. Beatrice's eyes are like twin stones, unfathomable, nothing to be read or gained. Sometimes Blair catches Beatrice kissing with her eyes open, always aware of the room and everyone in it. She is more like Blair than Serena could ever be, and that's partially why it's so different.

Blair leaves pale pink lipstick trails on Beatrice's skin and in return receives tiny half-moon bruises from Beatrice's nails. She runs a light touch over Beatrice's cunt, presses gently with the heel of her hand as her fingertips investigate further, gathering moisture to slide over Beatrice's folds. Then she sinks three fingers suddenly, a little rough, leans down to lick and feels Beatrice contract.

Dan is typing. Beatrice lets out a rare low moan, eyes closing as her head turns to the side. French education or not, Blair thinks, she learned quickly enough.

Beatrice puts on nineteen sixties French pop for Blair. It makes the atmosphere of the flat soft and dreamy, slipping through the usual Janis-or-Jim haze with a kind of languid indifference. They drink champagne. With a start, Blair realizes it's almost Christmas.

When the record begins to make it's second run through, Dan sets his glass down and sticks his cigarette back between his lips and bows deep at the waist. Blair answers with a curtsy, one ankle behind the other, before smiling and stepping close to drape her arms around his shoulders. She leans into his chest, her face against his neck.

He smells like coffee and paper, like Beatrice's cigarettes and Blair's shampoo. His sweater is soft and warm under her cheek and he spins them carefully, dances her around the apartment. She thinks of the first time they danced together, at a wedding, and how upset she'd been, how Dan had broken out one ridiculous move after another until she couldn't help laughing.

_Even then_ , she thinks. Even then.

Someone must find out where she is, because packages start arriving.

One day it's macarons. The next it's her favorite stockings. The next it's beautiful earrings, heavy with colored diamonds. Chuck, she thinks; maybe Louis, but she's less convinced he would look for her after what she did. And the surreptitious nature of the items, their silent and mysterious arrival at the door without a card or return address, all points to Chuck.

Beatrice takes the stockings and the perfume. Blair puts on lipstick and affixes the earrings as she sits in the bath, sipping champagne that had also been sent to her. The earrings are weighty and uncomfortable, but there's something sort of pleasing about that. She always had expensive taste.

Dan leans in the doorway with a frown. "You should have it all sent back," he says.

Blair raises an eyebrow. "Why? It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean anything." But he's still pouting, and it's ruining her fancy bath. She can't help being a little mean, mocking, "Would you feel better if we were sleeping together, like you had some kind of claim? Would you feel better if we were intimate?"

"We are intimate," Dan says. Then, "I know how it goes when he comes after you."

"It could be Louis," she points out.

"It's not," Dan says.

She sighs. "Come _here_."

He takes a moment more to sulk before undressing and getting in the bath, his dark clothes dropped unceremoniously on the white tile.

"Your knees are bony and hideous," Blair tells him, to break the tension. Then she tugs on his arm so he'll lean back against her, water sloshing a little, filling the air with the scent of her silly floral bubble bath. She puts one arm around him, over his chest, and buries her other hand in his hair. It's funny how familiar it is to touch him now, how quickly she got used to it.

Dan sighs a little, relaxing into her. "I know whatever this is isn't going to last," he says.

She tenses slightly. "What do you mean?"

"Can't run away forever." His head tilts back so he can look at her, curls scratchy against her skin. "Much as you may want to." He turns away again, hand coming up to toy with her fingers. "Nor do I think the…" He coughs. "Sex…thing…can continue forever."

"I don't want to talk about forever," Blair says huffily.

"Have to, eventually," Dan murmurs. He kisses her wrist.

Dan is still difficult for her to accept. There is her friend Dan who fights with her and makes her lunch and reads the books she tells him to; Dan who takes care of her when she really needs someone to do so; Dan who is very beautiful, and good at kissing. And there's her favorite Dan too, the Dan who always listens to her with complete understanding and offers up only thoughtful replies.

At some point in this endless trip, Blair realized that she has never had anyone she could talk to like she talks to Dan, and honestly she was starved for it. He's one of two or three people in the entire world who knows exactly who she is and chooses to love her anyway.

"They're just things," Blair says. The hand entwined with his tightens a little. "They're just things, they don't mean anything. I keep them because it's stupid and amusing that he thought I'd be swayed by that, after everything. They won't make me…" She clears her throat. "Forget about you."

Hastily, Dan says, "That's not what I –"

"I love you," Blair tells him in a rush. "So shut up, please."

He twists to look at her, half-smiling, and Blair purses her lips as she turns away in annoyance. That just makes Dan laugh, and he teases her until she attempts to drown him in the bathwater, which goes surging over the edge and probably soaks his clothes.

It pours on Christmas, rain pelting the windows and splashing down the streets, nearly drowning out the music playing in the apartment. They don't have a tree, but they put presents next to one of the potted plants.

Dan receives a carton of cigarettes from Beatrice, pointedly. Blair gets a typewritten story. Beatrice says all she wanted was to come, so Blair pushes her onto the floor next to the sad little plant and goes down on her.

Dan and Beatrice seem to have sex mainly when one or the other is angry, like they have to fuck or else they'll resort to violence. Blair only sees them at it half the time, furious half-dressed coupling against the wall or the rough punctuation to one of their many pointless arguments. Beatrice is so little she looks petite beside Dan, and he lifts her easily, her pale thighs parted for him to fit between. Hands fist in hair, Dan's ragged groans muffled against Beatrice's neck and her nails futilely gripping the back of his shirt. There's no kissing. Blair suspects they are not particularly attracted to each other, really.

Either that, or Beatrice gets him off when Blair cannot. Blair is a little jealous, then, but somehow still unable to cross that line herself.

When Beatrice is gone one night, Blair and Dan lay in bed with her tucked into his side. She traces the button of his black jeans before she pops it slowly, slides down the zipper. She trails slow kisses over his throat. "For me?" she asks.

Dan obliges, of course, and wraps his hand around himself. She always wonders if he goes so slowly because she's watching or if that's just how Dan does it, pumping steady and unhurried. His shirt is rucked up, exposing his stomach, and Blair lays her hand there so she can feel each tremor. When he comes, it's on his stomach; she moves her hand right before. She squirms restlessly beside him and doesn't know what she's waiting for.

"Okay," he says, soft and low, "Now you."

"Me?" Blair says, like she doesn't know what he means. She's wearing a gray sweater of his, and she allows him to push it up a little, to push her legs apart a little.

She doesn't bother to show off for him, instead getting right to business in the brisk habitual way she does when she's alone.

"What do you think about?" he asks.

Her fingers stutter over her clit but then return to their purposeful rhythm, seeking an end. "Depends," she breathes. She'd had a terrifying phase when she was fourteen of only being able to get off while thinking of Serena.

"Right now," he says, with a little bit of impatience.

Half a breath's pause, and, "You," Blair says honestly. She's thinking of his hard pretty cock in his almost-elegant hand, the smooth up and down slide, his frowning mouth, the quick inhale through his teeth when he came. She thinks of him murmuring a song against the skin of her inner thigh, of his mouth between Beatrice's legs, of his lips closing around Beatrice's nipple. She thinks of the way he cups her breast through her top when they kiss. She thinks of the day that's waiting on the horizon, when he'll be inside her for the first time. She thinks of him and her hips rise into it and she comes with a shudder.

Dan kisses her softly for a few long minutes, her lips and neck and shoulder. His hand rests lightly atop hers between her legs. "Let's watch _Red-Headed Woman_ ," he says.

"My mother knows."

Beatrice leans upon the door she'd just shut behind her. She gives a slow little sigh, folding her hands together, and looks at Blair and Dan, who had both been engrossed in separate books.

Dan is the first to speak. "Are we really that surprised?" he says. "Chuck's had a lojack on us for two weeks, and Serena called me three days ago."

Blair shoots him a look. "You didn't tell me that."

He shrugs. "I didn't pick up."

"The way I look at it," Beatrice continues, still slumped against the door, "We have two options. We go back –"

"Like adults," Dan interjects.

"And face the consequences, go on with our lives –"

"It's not like you killed a man," Dan points out.

Blair holds up a hand to hush him. "Or?"

"Or…" Beatrice meets her eyes, and almost barely smiles. "Is there anywhere else you've never been?"

Blair answers the smile with one of her own.

So they go to Seoul.


End file.
